OpenAI Creates Platform for Generating Fake News. Wonderful.

Don’t tell Donald Trump, but artificial intelligence (A.I.) may become quite good at generating fake news. Moreover, this generation of fabricated reportage is courtesy of OpenAI, the nonprofit designed explicitly to prevent A.I. from being used in terrible and unethical ways, so, um, great job, everyone.

Specifically, OpenAI’s “large-scale unsupervised language model” (dubbed GPT-2) is capable of generating “coherent paragraphs of text” and “achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks,” according to a posting on blog.openai.com. It was trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages, features 1.5 billion parameters, and is apparently very good at predicting the next word in a text string—meaning it could (reportedly) put together a very convincing article on the Martians that invaded Manhattan this morning.

If that wasn’t interesting/scary enough, the platform is also capable of “rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.”

Although OpenAI has declined to release this creation, citing its potential danger, it has issued a smaller model trained on a much smaller set of parameters (117 million). You can check out a version of the software that might potentially doom the entire planet on GitHub.

OpenAI’s stated mission is to create A.I. that is “safe.” In addition to building new artificial-intelligence tools, it also releases papers and open-source software tools for A.I. research. “We will not keep information private for private benefit,” the organization stated at one point, “but in the long term, we expect to create formal processes for keeping technologies private when there are safety concerns.”

It seems that GPT-2 is a prime example of a technology that will be kept (somewhat) private, at least for the moment. OpenAI has proven reluctant to release certain platforms in the past, such as its evolving bot that can beat humans at “Dota 2,” a multiplayer video game in which virtue heroes battle for control of a fantasy-world landscape.

In the meantime, those interested in OpenAI’s tools can pick through the ones available on the organization’s website. Just make sure you don’t use that code to invent something that generates fake news—or creates SkyNet. If you accidentally coded something that murdered most of the human race, you’d feel bad, right? Right?

“AI that is safe.” Good luck with that. How about “AI that is kept in a safe place.” That’s about the best we could do. When you talk about promoting Artificial Intelligence, as with anything that has its own intellect, the more advanced it becomes, the more it will try to exert its own will on its surroundings. Concentrate on keeping the Genie in the bottle. Like, not allowing it into a place where it can generate fake news. I have no idea how we’d accomplish that. Once it’s a thing, it will be very hard to control who’s hands it falls into. I suspect that at least at first it will be easy to detect, but that won’t last long.

Salary Predictor

Estimated base salary using job title, location, and skills.

More About Dice Salary Predictions

Where does this estimate come from?

Dice predicts salary ranges based on the job title, location, and skills listed in
individual job descriptions. Our proprietary machine-learning algorithm uses more
than 600,000 data points to make its predictions. To get the most accurate
prediction of the salary you might earn, customize the prediction in your Dice
profile. Actual salary offered by employer may vary.

How was this salary estimate calculated?

Dice's predictive salary model is a proprietary machine-learning algorithm. Unlike
many other salary tools that require a critical mass of reported salaries for a
given combination of job title, location and experience, the Dice model can make
accurate predictions on even uncommon combinations of job factors. The model does
this by recognizing patterns in the more than 600,000 salary data points to infer
how much each factor - job title, location, experience, education, and skills - will
impact the salary.

Career paths

YOUR CAREER. YOUR PATH.

Author Bio

Nick Kolakowski has written for The Washington Post, Slashdot, eWeek, McSweeney's, Thrillist, WebMD, Trader Monthly, and other venues. He's also the author of "A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps" and "Slaughterhouse Blues," a pair of noir thrillers.